HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
1,000-foot lava tube north of Shoshone with year-round ice and an undocumented Shoshone legend
1561 N Highway 75, Shoshone, ID 83352
Research updated August 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Modest per-person admission for the guided ice-cave walk when open; the museum, gift shop, and mining sluice operate separately Thursday-Sunday. As of research, the ice cave itself is temporarily closed for structural repairs to its internal walkway -- check the website before visiting.
Access
Limited Access
Underground lava-tube walkway, below freezing year-round; steps and uneven surfaces
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1880 · 19th-Century Ice Source for the Town of Shoshone · Snake River Plain Lava-Tube Formation · Robinson-Family Tourist Attraction Since the 1950s
The cave is a lava tube formed by ancient volcanic flows on the Snake River Plain: as the surface of a lava flow cooled and hardened, molten rock beneath kept moving and left a hollow tunnel behind. The thick basalt walls and the way winter air pools in the tube keep the interior below freezing even in summer, and the cave supplied ice to the nearby town of Shoshone starting in the 1880s, decades before mechanical refrigeration.
Early tourism-era development damaged the site. Accounts of the cave's history describe an access tunnel cut in the early 1940s that let too much warm air in and melted much of the ice mass. The Robinson family acquired the property in the 1950s; Russell Robinson studied the cave's air-circulation patterns and worked to restore its ice by keeping the entrance sealed through the warm months, succeeding by 1962.
The site operates today with a museum, gift shop, and an outdoor mining-sluice exhibit alongside the cave itself. As of 2026, the cave's interior walkway needs structural repairs, and the operators have closed that portion of the attraction while raising funds to rebuild it; the museum and grounds remain open on a reduced Thursday-through-Sunday schedule.
Sources
Tour guides and staff have described hearing footsteps and hushed voices in the cave after visitors have left and the attraction is closed for the night, a pattern echoed in more than one independent write-up of the site. The cave's own acoustic properties complicate any reading of these reports: lava tubes amplify and distort sound, and the space's temperature swings are well documented and unrelated to anything supernatural.
A separate strand of local folklore attaches a Native American story to the cave -- in one telling naming a Shoshone woman, sometimes called Edahow, said to be entombed in the ice, and in another claiming that Shoshone people froze to death sheltering there during the winter of 1895. No newspaper account, tribal record, or other primary source corroborates either version, and both should be read as unverified tourist-era legend rather than documented history.
A guided walk roughly 100 feet below the surface through a 1,000-foot lava tube that holds ice year-round, used as a 19th-century ice source for the town of Shoshone and developed into a tourist attraction by the Robinson family starting in the 1950s. As of this writing the cave is temporarily closed for walkway repairs -- the museum, gift shop, and outdoor mining-sluice exhibit remain open. Check the website for reopening updates.
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